


Make the World Brand New

by thelittlegreennotebook



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Romantic Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-09
Updated: 2014-12-09
Packaged: 2018-02-28 17:43:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2741360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelittlegreennotebook/pseuds/thelittlegreennotebook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the stick turns blue, her feelings intensify by about a million. She becomes shattered and whole, thrilled and terrified. One hundred percent convinced that she can never tell him, like, ever.</p><p>(Yeah, so the science of that resolution probably won’t work out. Felicity raises an indignant middle finger to science.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Make the World Brand New

**Author's Note:**

> Because we're all going to be drowning in angst and heartbreak come Wednesday, have some happiness. Title from The Weepies' "World Spins Madly On."

Felicity has always wanted a family. It’s something that she knows she needs as certainly as she knows the need to breathe. Being abandoned by a father who obviously never loved her and cared for by a mother who never understood her—it set a sort of precedent, a sort of challenge. She wants what she never had: a home, complete with cozy bedtime stories and cheery holidays and too many birthdays to count.

It would be a miserable lie to say she hasn’t thought about it more than a million times, this future she could someday build with someone she loves. Naturally, when Oliver enters the picture, those thoughts turn to him.

They’ve only been together for eight months, a precarious, glass relationship that is both stronger and more fragile than any other she’s had before. This feeling she has around him—it’s overwhelming, like it could hold the weight of the world and break her in the same breath. It paralyzes her and she can’t live without it.

When the stick turns blue, her feelings intensify by about a million. She becomes shattered and whole, thrilled and terrified. One hundred percent convinced that she can never tell him, like, _ever._

(Yeah, so the science of that resolution probably won’t work out. Felicity raises an indignant middle finger to science.)

Although her concern is generally unfounded—Oliver’s nightly activities may be dangerous but Oliver himself isn’t dangerous—she keeps the information to herself few days, anyway. Despite her best intentions, she becomes distant and withdrawn and weird. She lies awake at night with wide eyes and Oliver’s arms wrapped around her waist, sure that he’s going to wake up at any moment with the realization that a tiny life pulses beneath his hands.

When four days turn into a week, she’s bordering on hysterical. Her focus has been destroyed and she seems to jump from one emotion to the next with absolutely no warning. Oliver finds her standing nearly catatonic in the shower one morning, and she barely gets by with telling him that she was just wrapped up in thoughts of codes, her mind a tangle of indecipherable ones and zeros.

Her mind is definitely a tangle of indecipherable _something_ , but it’s nothing close to the coherence of her beloved technobabble.

Digg, for one, seems to know what’s going on. First, from previous experience and second, because he is scarily perceptive in ways that Oliver isn’t when it comes to her. Not to say that Oliver hasn’t noticed in some capacity, because he obviously has. Knocking on the shower door for almost a minute before he manages to shake her from her reverie doesn’t exactly speak to his ignorance—or her sanity, for that matter. She can’t count the number of times he’s asked her what’s wrong. She’s dismissed his questions with everything from bad sushi to her period, grateful that she can lie so much better than he can and feeling guilty all the while.

She’s not exactly sure what page Roy is on these days, but he gives her silent, sideways looks that only go to show how skittish he gets around flaring female hormones.

It’s one particular night that breaks her, just eight days after she peed on the god-forsaken stick. From the minute Oliver picks up his bow and heads towards the stairs, she has an uncomfortable feeling in her gut.

“Do you—I mean, it’s pretty quiet tonight,” she says casually, walking up behind him. “No need to go out, really.” She feels Digg’s gaze pressed into her back chanting _tell him, tell him, tell him_ , and she crosses her arms low over her stomach.

Oliver turns around with the sparest of smiles on his lips, thinking her concern is just the standard level of care and, therefore, adorable.

“I’ll be back,” he says simply, bending down to press a light, lingering kiss on her lips. His words cause a lump of dread to form at the base of her heart.

“Oliver,” she says, stopping him again. “I have a really bad feeling about this.”

His brows furrows as he looks at her, concerned. “Why?” he asks. “What’s wrong?”

She looks at him for a long moment, tension gathering in her chest as she contemplates just saying it right there. _I’m pregnant. We’re going to have a baby. Sending you out at night in what I now realize is a ridiculously thin, unguarded leather suit gives me heart palpitations and severe nausea—neither of which can be good for the baby. The_ baby.

Instead, she swallows and shakes her head. “Nothing,” she says. _He’s right. It’ll be fine. He does this all the time_. _You’re being dramatic._ “It’s fine. I’m being…never mind. Please come back, though. Preferably in one piece” She makes an attempt at a weak smile and his eyebrows pull together curiously. For a second she thinks that this is it, she’s been busted, but he only leans forward again to press a kiss to her forehead.

Digg brushes past her on his way out when Oliver and Roy are already jogging up the stairs. “Soon, Felicity,” he tells her quietly, and his well-intended warning sends a chill up her spine. “You need to do it soon.”

Defiance curls in her stomach, hot and fearful and irrational, at his words. But then he’s gone, they all are, and she has nothing but the silence of the foundry to argue against her life choices.

She thinks maybe things have hit rock bottom already, but they seem to go downhill from there. It is a quiet night—she wasn’t wrong about that. Until, suddenly, she is.

Oliver accidentally hops into a major drug deal that’s going on in the glades while Digg and Roy are intervening on a simple mugging halfway across the city. Within five minutes there are at least fifteen guys surrounding the Arrow, all armed with no less than two guns.

“Get out of there,” Felicity says, panic laced thick into her voice. “Get out _now_.”

It’s easier said than done, though, even with training as comprehensive and intense as his. No matter how good he may be, it’s impossible to fire fifteen arrows at once. He takes two of them out with a net that explodes from his bow and downs two more with tranquilizers. One he shoots in the leg out of pure desperation, hitting the muscles in just a way to bring the man to his knees and render him immobile. Another one falls with a net tangled around his legs. Two more are restrained with thick, impervious chords. He goes into hand-to-hand with three more, taking one down with a punch and the other two with swift kicks. All of this while dodging bullets.

But the four other guys finally get him. One bullet manages to graze him on the shoulder and another gets imbedded near his knee. Once he’s down, they don’t hesitate in kicking the ever-loving shit out of him.

Felicity listens to all of this with a hand clamped over her mouth and tears swimming in her eyes.

“John?” she asks, her voice wavering and desperate.

“Two minutes,” Digg says tensely, which would be fine if Felicity could say that Oliver had two minutes to spare.

When she starts hearing nothing but grunts and kicks, she knows something’s wrong.

“Oliver?” she asks. More punches, more kicks. He’s definitely on the ground. “Oliver, get up. _Get up_.”

“Felicity,” he says vaguely, his voice broken into shards that pierce through her skin. She’s heard her name from his lips a thousand times in a thousand different tones—happy, angry, laughing, sad, desperate and hesitant. But never, never hopeless. Never like _goodbye._  

She stands up, twirling away from her screen because who the hell cares about locations at a time like this. A time when Oliver Queen might actually be on the losing end of a fight.

“Oliver, stand _up_ ,” she demands, her voice sharp and biting and insistent. “You don’t get to do this to me. You do _not_ get to quit, not now, not when we…” Fuck it. “We are having a baby, Oliver Queen, so _you do not get to do this_ _to me._ ”

“What?” is what comes over the comms a few moments later, weak and confused and distant. She barely keeps herself from rolling her eyes because his life is really on the line here and there’s no time for comic relief.

“If you die, I will _kill_ you,” she summarizes for him, talking fiercely into her earpiece.

After that he _does_ get to his feet; she can gather that much. But that’s not the end of the conversation.

“How long have you known?” he asks into the comms, and her stomach gives a squeeze at the bite in his voice.

“Maybe you should focus on—”

“How _long_ , Felicity?”

“Eight days,” she says feebly, and that’s the end of that.

Really, the druggies don’t stand a chance.

Digg and Roy show up seconds later and take care of any of the men who are left standing or have managed to get up in the wake of their injuries. Everything is rounded up pretty quickly, but she can tell that the leader of the pack got away sometime earlier in the scuffle because Oliver has gone from hopeless to angry in no time.

Angry escalates to _furious_ when Digg doesn’t let him go after the guy. 

“You can barely stand, man,” he says sternly, in a tone that brooks no argument as Oliver strains against him. “Back off. We’ll get him another day.”

She listens as her boys clamor into the van, leaving Oliver’s motorcycle behind because apparently his injuries keep him from using his legs at all. She can tell he’s not in the sunshine-iest of moods from the way he’s growling with every step, his anger rolling off of him in waves that permeate their link. She’s biting on her fingernails, once again coming down from the agony of what it’s like to almost lose him for good.

Replacing the agony are fluttering nerves at the thought of facing him now, with everything on the table. He’s eerily quiet, and she’s certain that not a small amount of his frustration and aggression is directed at the fact that she told him she was pregnant over the comms when he was about to die.

Apparently Roy thinks so, too, because he almost says so to Oliver’s face. _Big mistake._

“Dude, maybe you should…you know, cool off, take some deep breaths—”

She winces at the _deep breaths_ comment, because she’s been around that block once or twice and the results are never particularly delightful.

“Back off, Roy,” he growls.

“ _Oliver,”_ she says.

“ _Felicity,”_ he warns.

She takes a long, slow breath, knowing that a wounded, pissed off Oliver who couldn’t deliver his daily dose of prison to active criminals is a fickle person to handle.

There’s nothing but a dense, serious silence after that, and when Felicity hears the van pull up to the club she shuts off her comm and tugs the piece out of her hear, tossing it down on her desk. She starts pacing back and forth behind her desk, waiting for the inevitable moment when she has to face him—when she has to face _this_.

When he comes down the stairs, he’s ahead of Roy and Digg, which is not something she was expecting. He’s walking on an extremely severe limp and his left leg seems to be dragging behind a bit. A wince flashes over his face with every step but he’s determined and angry and—oh, dear.

Roy steps in front of him as he makes his way towards her, and she’s positive that Oliver would never, _ever_ hurt her but sometimes—well, sometimes he just needs to take a minute to cool down by a few degrees. Or fifty. His temper is not the steadiest of the bunch, so she can’t say she’s not relieved for Roy’s intervention, no matter how brief.

“I think we should fix up your leg before…” Roy says, trailing off as Oliver glares down at him and God, if looks could _kill._

“Roy,” Oliver says throughgritted teeth. “I need to have a conversation with Felicity. And I’m _not_ going to do it over your shoulder. So either you can move, or I can make you.”

“Oliver,” she says, her voice a breath ghosting over her lips with incredible softness. He looks up at her and his eyes are wide, full of uncontrollable emotion as his gaze meets hers.

“ _Roy_ ,” he says with a clenched jaw, still looking at Felicity. Roy hesitates a moment more before stepping to the side, moving towards Diggle. Oliver hobble-drags himself until he’s standing directly in front of the spot to which her feet are frozen. There’s blood streaming down his leg where he was shot and his teeth are clamped together from the pain. She inhales sharply and her hand gravitates towards his wound to assess it. He catches her fingers with his and tugs them away from his leg.

She lifts her gaze to meet his, her eyes glassy and sharp and anxious.

“Tell me again,” he says roughly, his voice sending a shiver of electricity down her spine.

“We should really check your leg— _legs_ …did you break your ankle? Because that’s really not something—”

“Felicity,” he says, his tone commanding her attention. “Tell me again.”

She tugs her bottom lip between her teeth and feels how her fingers are trembling where he holds them between their bodies. His eyes, dark and searching, are pleading with her and she can’t—won’t—deny him anything when he’s looking at her like that. Like the beat of her heart keeps the earth hinged on its axis.

“I’m pregnant,” she says, her voice so gentle it’s practically a whisper. “We’re going to have a baby.” His eyes shutter to a close. Her heart pounds out a heavy beat against her rib cage because his eyes have always been his giveaway, the open lock to his emotions. Closing her off from that leaves her lost and stumbling, just like she has been for the past eight days, and she doesn’t want to be alone in this—not anymore.

When his lids open again, the blue beneath them is just as unreadable as before, although that may be from the tears blurring her vision.

“We’re going to have a baby?” he asks, his voice low and warm as he bends so that his face is hovering just above hers, his breath ghosting over her cheeks. Large hands reach up fervently to span her waist with an impenetrable protectiveness, as if she’s the most precious thing in the entire world. A single tear slips down her cheek because of the emotion, thick and hot, that fills her heart at his words. She jerks her head incoherently and the sob that escapes her lips is halfway between a laugh and a cry.

He tugs her up against his torso then, as one arm bands around her waist and the other anchors in her hair. She sinks into him, slipping her fingers beneath his unzipped jacket and winding her arms around his waist. Holding him tightly, she buries her face against the damp cotton of his t-shirt and revels in the warmth that surrounds her, a promise and a comfort and a _home_.

“We’re having a baby,” he breathes against his neck, the phrase a thing of wonder as it leaves his lips and finally, _finally,_ she’s happy.


End file.
